Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Big who wrote (22641)	11/3/1999 11:12:00 AM
From: KevinMark	Respond to of 108040

In BFRE!

To: Mr. Big who wrote (22641)	11/3/1999 11:23:00 AM
From: Frederick Langford	Respond to of 108040

BFRE, I like it: Company Description We are a leading provider of services that enable electronic commerce merchants and Internet portals to market their products and services in tens of thousands of locations on the Internet and to pay for these promotions based on performance. Our e-merchant and portal customers use our services to establish and manage performance marketing relationships directly with these third party locations. We enable the third party marketing partners to integrate our customers' promotions into their Web sites and e-mail messages that contain content that is relevant to the products or services being promoted. Our customers pay their marketing partners only for those promotions that generate sales or traffic. In this way, our customers create their own performance marketing sales channels. We provide a cost-effective solution for establishing, managing and rewarding these channels. We enable our customers to increase their sales and traffic and decrease their cost of customer acquisition. Our services are critical to online performance marketing because they: . provide the data interchange that integrates our customers' catalog, transactional and fulfillment systems with tens of thousands of Web sites and e-mail messages created by their marketing partners; . enable our customers to generate and manage a variety of promotional links for each of their products or services; . enable each of our customer's marketing partners to select those promotional links that are relevant to the content on its Web site or within its e-mail messages and integrate those links within that content; . track the effectiveness of each individual promotion by recording each time a user views it on a marketing partner's site, clicks on it and is directed to our customer's site, and makes a purchase on that customer's site; and . collect, store and analyze viewing, click-through and sales data to improve the effectiveness of online marketing and to reduce the cost of customer acquisition. Using our services, our customers pay only for those individual promotions that succeed. Our e-merchant customers typically pay their marketing partners only for the sales they generate. Our portal customers typically pay their marketing partners only for the traffic they send to the portal. Our fees are also typically based on the level of sales or traffic generated for our customers through their performance marketing channels. As a result, our economic interests are closely aligned with the economic interests of our customers and their marketing partners. Our performance marketing services to date have focused on enabling our customers to establish and manage affiliate sales channels. These channels comprise third-party Web site publishers that include on their sites promotional links to their affiliated e-merchants and portals. We also provide performance marketing services which enhance more traditional online marketing, such as the serving of ad banners, by tracking their effectiveness through to a sale. Recently, we expanded our performance marketing services to enable the inclusion of promotions in e-mail messages sent by businesses and individuals. The promotions we tracked for our customers were shown more than 300 million times in June 1999 through the more than one million performance marketing relationships our customers have established. Jupiter Communications, an Internet research firm, estimates that e-merchants with an affiliate sales channel generate on average 17% of their online sales from that channel. We believe that affiliate sales channels and other online performance marketing channels will constitute an increasingly significant revenue source for our customers. Our Market Opportunity The Internet has experienced rapid growth both in terms of the number of users online and in the amount and dispersion of content available to them online. The Internet has also emerged as a significant sales channel for goods and services to consumers, with total U.S. online consumer spending projected to increase from $7.8 billion in 1998 to $108.0 billion in 2003. E-merchants and portals use online promotions to reach a global audience for their products and services, drive traffic to their Web sites, attract customers and facilitate transactions. Initially, these online promotions took the form of banner advertisements. Under this model an advertiser pays fees based on the number of times its ad is displayed and typically evaluates the performance of that ad based on the rate at which viewers click on it and are directed to the advertiser's Web site. As a result of decreases in these click-through rates and a need to reach a broader audience viewing more widely dispersed content, e-merchants and portals sought to pay for their marketing programs based on the sales or traffic they generated. These affiliate sales channels have emerged as the first widely introduced type of these performance marketing programs. E-merchants and portals face several challenges in establishing and managing performance marketing programs. These challenges include developing technologies to exchange data with thousands of marketing partners that operate disparate systems, generating and placing promotions and managing relationships with large numbers of marketing partners. In addition, marketing partners want to minimize the time and expense associated with enrolling in a performance marketing program and creating and changing promotions for a particular e- merchant or portal. We believe these challenges provide a significant opportunity for our comprehensive solutions that are designed to help e- merchants and portals establish and manage performance marketing channels and to help marketing partners enhance their revenue. Our Strategy Our objective is to be the leading provider of online performance marketing solutions. We are focusing on the following strategic initiatives to achieve this objective: . continue our technology leadership and expertise to enhance and extend our comprehensive solutions for performance marketing programs; . rapidly expand our targeted customer base, both in the U.S. and selected markets abroad; . continue to provide customer branded and controlled solutions; . increase the size and effectiveness of our customers' sales channels; and . expand our services to existing customers. Our History We were incorporated in 1996 in Delaware under the name Freedom of Information, Inc. and changed our name to Be Free, Inc. in March 1999. In August 1998 we combined with two affiliated companies under common control and management. One affiliated company was incorporated in 1985 in Pennsylvania and the other was incorporated in 1996 in Delaware. All of our financial statements and data in this prospectus are presented on a consolidated basis for all three entities.